00:00 What is this phrase “I am” refer to?
We have all been saying “I am this” and “I am that” for decades.
What is the I that I am, that is temporarily qualified by a particular age or status or feeling?
What do we refer to when we say “I am” — don’t answer verbally for the moment. I want to use the question to take you to the experience.
The Sufi poet Rumi said: flow down and down and down in ever-widening rings of being.
He meant: give your attention to your essential, unqualified being which shines in the mind as the knowledge “I am”.
Stay with the feeling of unqualified being; and as we stay with it, it gradually loses all the qualities and attributes that we have superimposed upon it, over the years.
That’s why he said: flow down, and down, and down in ever-widening rings of being.
The deeper we sink, into our own being, the wider our being becomes.
03:00 As attention sinks into our essential being, our being is gradually divested of all the qualities, the feelings, the attributes that have temporarily attached themselves to our essential, unqualified being.
Normally our essential being is so thoroughly mixed with feelings, qualities and attributes that it’s essential, unconditioned nature is lost or veiled.
When a feeling for instance of sadness appears, we say: I am sad.
Our essential being seems to become the feeling of sadness; we define ourselves according to that feeling: I am sad, I am lonely, I am sick.
In this way our essential being is continuously losing itself in feelings, states, qualities.
In this way our essential being seems to acquire limitations, finite qualities.
It seems to acquire an age, a location, a gender, a status, a level of health, a level of wealth, a level of intelligence, etc.
06:25 Be in touch with your essential being, that is ground for all experience, but is not limited by any particular experience.
Discover the unlimitedness of your essential self; the absolute freedom from all particular qualities of your essential being.
We don’t have to work hard at liberating our essential being from these qualities, but rather simply to recognize that it is already, and has always been unconditioned by any particular thought, feeling state, or quality.
So the essence of meditation is simply to give our essential being our attention; for our essential being to give itself its attention; to simply be
aware of the experience of being aware.
That is how God knows itself in each of us as each of us.
09:04 The I in each of us is God’s infinite being.
The I or the “I am” that shines in the mind of the apparently separate self doesn’t belong to a separate self; it belongs to God’s infinite being.
Just as the reality of a character in a movie doesn’t belong to the character, it belongs to the screen — the unconditioned background of the movie.
God’s infinite being shines in the mind as the knowledge “I am”.
So, if the mind wants to know its reality, all it has to do is turn it’s knowing or its attention towards the I that is at its center.
